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a.k.a. "The Give-A-Buck BLOG" This page contains information about the current status of give-a-buck.com and whatever else is on my mind. Effective IMMEDIATELY, registered mail to the United States is being phased out as a shipping option. The only option with tracking for orders to the U.S. is Xpresspost, and this will cost $20-$26. No exceptions, unless you want to pay the full cost of Fedex or another courier. As always, orders of $200 or more require tracking. Regular mail is an option for orders up to $199.99. I have also made additional pricing changes in the TERMS AND CONDITIONS section. Shipping is not as cheap as it used to be. That's the hidden cost of going electronic. 2. June 29, 2011... The postal strike is over... for now. That means I am open for business once again. I just want to say that while I agree with the back-to-work legislation to end the strike, I don't agree with the legislated settlement. It was short-sighted and allowed Canada Post to break off negotiations with the postal workers' union. I think it would have made more sense to bring in a mediator to force a settlement. And personally, I don't buy what a few rogue reporters said in the media about Canada Post being obsolete. Obviously, if you never buy anything online, you don't need mail service. Canada Post is still much cheaper than the private alternative. What would you prefer to pay to send a letter across the country... 59 cents or ten dollars? I rest my case. 3. May 29, 2011... You may already have guessed this to be the case if you've been paying attention to the news, but the Canada Post labour negotiations with the workers' union are not looking too positive these days. Consequently, I have decided to suspend all sales on this website and on ebid.net. My ebid listings are still active, but I have blocked the ability for anyone to place bids. Sorry, folks, but the risk of something going wrong is too high, and the union could drop a 72-hour strike notice at any moment. Shipping by regular mail has been slower than normal for motnhs now. That's the result of postal workers showing us how much they appreciate our business and how fortunate they feel just to have such well-paid jobs. It's still my responsibility to get paid items to my clients quickly, which is why I have decided to suspend all sales. Even though registered mail and Xpresspost have been getting through on schedule up until recently, I feel that problems could arise if certain agitators working for Canada Post get their hands on my packages. So unlike what Canada Post is saying, it's not "business as usual". If you absolutely must have something on this website's listings, let's discuss an alternative shipping option. 4. February 19, 2011... A long-awaited and necessary update to the Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) page has been completed. X. April 9, 2009... YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO BE OFFENDED  This "cartoon" was originally put online as a piece of satire to mock the way certain members of a certain online numismatic coin forum (guess which one??) were shamefully judging eBay sellers without regard for any sense of personal ethics or laws against slander. It was (and still is) commonplace for a member of the forum to post a link to an active eBay auction, and other forum members jump in with their own posts saying just about anything they wanted about the item and the seller. The reputations of certain eBay sellers were tarnished based on doubts raised by anonymous participants in an online numismatic forum. In many cases, the sellers affected did absolutely nothing wrong, but just like other criminal allegations made against innocent citizens, the seeds of doubt remain planted in the minds of many who read the forum. When called into question, some forum diehards defended the practices, saying it was part of the greater good of protecting buyers and disseminating information that might protect an unwary buyer from making a bad purchase. Another way of looking it (the cynic's perspective) is as an effective means of dissuading competition for desirable items. Many of the forum users are also eBay members (surprise!), and a potential buyer who finds an interesting item for sale can post a link in the off-eBay forum, asking questions like "Does this look fake?", and then bid on the item after the seller is put under the microscope and all of his/her warts are counted and scrutinized in front of their peers. Auction researcher Ken Steiglitz put forward a theory that attracting even one more bidder can drastically increase the potential hammer price of an item. So I guess the corollary of this theory, put into good use by the members of the forum, is that if you discourage even just one interested bidder... Well, I guess I'm too much of a fuss-pot traditionalist who believes in using existing tools like sniping as a means of reducing open warfare for eBay items. I'm also a traditionalist when it comes to free speech. The mewling puking little babies that infest the coin forum seem to think free speech means you can say anything about anyone and not be held accountable because the Internet is the last frontier of lawlessness and reckless human behaviour. Free speech actually means that you can say anything you want as long as you're prepared to accept that there may be reprecussions for your actions, and whining about your right to be protected against reprecussions in just that, whining. If you say that I am a shady dealer and I hornswaggle my customers so thus all buyers should avoid me, and you say that in a publicly-accessible forum, you have the right to do that as long as you realize you could be prosecuted for violating laws that say you can't spread libel like that. You should also accept that there is a possibility that I could confront you in person and punch you in the throat as a direct result of your spreading hateful lies about me, and there's no law that will protect you from getting badly hurt. Like a schoolyard bully, these forum members think they are all-powerful and beyond reproach, until someone actually decides to fight back, and then they cry and hide behind their Mommy's skirt. ANYHOW, I goaded some members of that stupid forum into reacting to some comments I made about the forum, and one of the things I did was post the above picture on the Internet. The picture depicts the murderous terrorists in the Middle East, the ones using an extremist interpretation of Islam to attack Western values and Western citizens. They are about to decapitate American citizen Nick Berg in an infmaous video posted to the Internet. My purpose in posting the modified picture with captions is to show that the members of the coin forum are behaving a LOT like the Islamic terrorists. They have formed a de-facto vigilante justice squad that acts as its own judge, jury and executioner when deciding to go after certain eBay sellers. Of course, like I made clear above, many of the members of this squad of retards is not really concerned with protecting their fellow collectors. They're just out to hurt someone and protect their own bottom lines, not because it's right, but because they can. Not surprisingly, some chose to react quite vehemently to the photo I posted. I call them retards because someone who sees my use of this picture as an attack on Canadian and U.S. military forces is quite stupid or utterly misguided. One person, calling himself an ex-serviceman from the U.S., thought what I did was so terrible that I deserved physical harm and intimated what he would do if he knew where I lived. Yeah, I have the screenshot to prove he said that, so don't go there. For the record, I support the troops and I support the mission in Afghanistan, even though many Canadians don't support the latter and would pull out of Afghanistan tomorrow if it was possible. Our military forces are there to protect our rights as Canadians. I apologized to people who were offended by my cartoon, but I'm not sorry for what I did. I defend the right of Canadians to offend other Canadians, especially the little pukes who hide behind Mommy's skirt until the bad man goes away. I hope our servicemen and servicewomen are fighting overseas to protect the collective right of free speech, not just their own viewpoints and how they would like us to see them. I know that there will always be a few agitators who revel in creating chaos, and they would oppose me even if I went on record as saying the sky is blue and water is wet. Believe me, I had a number of angry messages directed to me by e-mail (anonymously, of course) and through eBay as a result of my postings. Some guys just need to get a life, and no amount of words will ever permeate their thick cerebral cortices. So for Mikey and Randy (it's too late for Al), I offer you the following wordless advice: 
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